I write about the Internet technologies and upstarts that are disrupting advertising and media faster than ever. I'm living this disruption, so I might as well write about it, too. I spent nine years as chief of BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau writing about the leading edge of technology and business, and I continue to do so for a variety of publications. Follow my posts here by clicking the "+ Follow" link under my name. You can also find me at my personal Web site RobHof.com, follow me on Twitter (robhof), Circle me on Google+, subscribe to me on Facebook, and email me (robert.hof@gmail.com).

It’s a good point, and well-made, but I think it’s more than that. The real problem is that your mom, your uncle, your husband, and your best friend still don’t get Twitter.

Less-than-swift growth is certainly a symptom. Since reaching 200 million monthly active users last December, Twitter has added just 40 million more to date, working out to an expected 260 million by year-end. That’s way short of CEO Dick Costolo’s goal of 400 million. Either way, it’s nowhere near the audience of FacebookFacebook or YahooYahoo. According to one analytics firm, it has even fallen behind the much-maligned GoogleGoogle+, though it’s not clear the numbers are comparable.

And that’s worldwide. If you use the 70% international-30% domestic ratio Twitter cited last January, Twitter has 72 million active users in the U.S.–only 30% of the adult population, not to mention millions more younger people who can use the service, which no longer has an age limit.

AllThingsD raises a couple of logical issues: Along with its evident growth over the last few years, Twitter has always had high churn, as people try it and then drift away–Twitter quitters, they’re called. The company also has been culling spam accounts. I’d add another couple of considerations: Maybe that 400 million target of Costolo’s was just that–a stretch goal meant to keep the entire company focused on building an audience as much as building a business but not necessarily something he expected to achieve. And if “active” use means you tweet, perhaps we’re missing many, many millions of people who simply lurk but lurk a lot.

Still, I think the growth issue is simply a sign of a more fundamental problem: Twitter hasn’t yet caught on with the masses.

Now, that may sound ridiculous on its face. A lot of folks will reasonably argue that Twitter is already mainstream. Its hashtags are on half the ads in the Super Bowl, every celebrity worth mentioning (and many more not worth mentioning) has a Twitter handle, and “tweet” now has an official Twitter-related definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. But most people in the world, the country, even online would have trouble defining exactly what Twitter is for–certainly nowhere as easily as they could define why they’re on Facebook, which had IPO problems but not for lack of easily described value to users.

It’s also true that while 240 million active monthly users is a problem that thousands of apps and Web services would love to have, it’s not enough to catapult Twitter into the advertising big leagues. Nobody’s quibbling with Twitter’s growth in ad revenues, but ultimately even a quarter-billion people is probably not enough to persuade most major marketers accustomed to getting very broad reach to budget all that much to Twitter. Sure, they may like targeting by keywords or whatever, like on Google. But to get broad enough scale, they need a huge audience so the subset they want to reach is still big enough to move their needles, whether it’s clicks or brand lift or sales, and Twitter isn’t there yet.

The central problem is that too many people still don’t get Twitter. Do a search on Twitter for <I don’t get twitter> and Google will spit out 11.5 billion results. (For comparison, <I don’t get Google+> gets 5.5 billion entries.) Even in Silicon Valley, presumably ground zero for Twitterati, you can still find a lot of folks who don’t understand why they’d want to use it. Their response when I mention what Twitter is, admittedly imperfectly–the 21st century news service, a snapshot of current trends or happenings, a place where you can follow what friends are doing, a chance to show how pithily clever you are–is usually a puzzled shrug and a muttered “I don’t care what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast.” Then they go back to trolling Facebook.

For the record, I am not one of those people. For years now, Twitter has been a daily and sometimes hourly staple. Like many people, I often see news there first. I can follow people I write about or want to write about to get a less diluted sense of what they’re thinking. Not least–consider this a disclosure of sorts–Twitter helps me pay my mortgage, by providing a place to publicize my writing and thus sending me and Forbes a lot of readers.

So what’s going to get hundreds of millions more people onto Twitter? No doubt hiring a new head of growth from Google will help, but there’s a bigger to-do list: Provide a better explanation of what Twitter offers. Create an easier way to follow your real friends and people with similar interests. (Hey–maybe like this.) Get people past arcane terminology like retweets. Improve the messaging system.

Most of all: Provide better filtering. Follow more than a few people, and suddenly you realize you’re missing the vast majority of what those people are tweeting. That could be a good thing, but you always have the nagging feeling that you’re constantly missing important stuff.

Sure, there are workarounds. I know how to create lists of specific people to follow, but they take too much work and I don’t end up bothering with them that much anyway. I know you can search for a person or a keyword or hashtag, and that works pretty well, but I often don’t want to bother figuring out what I should know about right now. Complain all you want about Facebook’s news feed selection algorithm, but at least you don’t feel overwhelmed. Whatever filtering Twitter’s doing, the firehose is still gushing.

It seems clear that Twitter knows all this, because it has steadily made moves to broaden its appeal beyond the technorati, celebrity stalkers, and the media elite. But if it can’t cross the chasm to reach the true masses, it faces not only a tougher IPO but a more limited future than many people imagined.

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To the vast majority of people Twitter is an unnecessary thing. Just another distraction one can easily do without. I can’t see anything that will change this. In time Twitter will become as relevant as Second Life.

For the record, I get Twitter. I just do not need another distraction from a “social media” data mining and ad company. My real world social chatting comes in the form of business meetings and parties. This next statement will sound sexist and elitist, but it is my observation. Those around me that twitter are people on welfare and sit at home with time on their hands, the majority women, and teenage girls. If twitter can somehow harness getting money or advertisers to target this population then they will do well I guess.

Concerning the IPO. People that invest in companies blindly deserve to have their money stolen. Facebook has never proven it turns a profit with their business model and now Twitter is going to release an IPO and keep their financials “secret”. Oh My! It’s still a brave new world. I’ll wait until the dust settles and follow the smart money.